WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — As Hollywood financier Steven Mnuchin finally got his confirmation vote as Treasury secretary this week, it’s a good time to muse how much happier we might be if our president came from Hollywood instead of reality TV.

Just think how much rosier things wood look if we had a vigorous president like Harrison Ford in the 1997 film “Air Force One.” Or the former fighter-pilot president played by Bill Pullman in the original “Independence Day” in 1996. Or more recently, Aaron Eckhart’s resourceful boxer-president who teams with Gerard Butler to save the day in “Olympus Has Fallen” and “London Has Fallen.”

In Hollywood movies, septuagenarian billionaires are most likely to appear as the villain, the mastermind pulling the strings of some nefarious plot that James Bond or whoever must foil. But not the president.

Of all the unprecedented things in the campaign and early presidency of Donald Trump, the fact that his Treasury nominee gets confirmed in the very week his most recent film tops the box office has to be one of the most bizarre.

It takes more than money to be as consistently successful in Hollywood as Mnuchin has been. So many of his films have been megahits — last year alone “Batman vs Superman” and “Suicide Squad” were among the top 10 grossing films — it’s clear that he has his finger on the pulse of what American audiences want to see. Nonetheless, the press has painted him as part of an out-of-touch financial elite.

It’s surprising how little press this success has gotten compared to all the ink spilled about his years at Goldman Sachs or turning around the financial disaster that was mortgage lender IndyMac.

The controversy over foreclosure practices at the bank, renamed OneWest after the takeover, includes charges of widespread “robo-signing” of foreclosures — automatic signing by bank officers without sufficient review — though Mnuchin disputed that in written responses to questions from his confirmation hearing.

However insensitive Mnuchin and other private-sector bankers might have been in foreclosing on defaulted mortgages, it is worth bearing in mind that it was the failure of the Obama administration — and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner personally — to provide any effective mortgage relief for individuals that resulted in the most anguish during that period.

It’s probably fair to say that Mnuchin in his role as film producer would never let a character like Donald Trump be president. Nonetheless, it was financier Mnuchin who swept in and bolstered Trump’s faltering fundraising efforts and helped produce him into a real-life president. As in Hollywood, he picked another popular hit.

Much has been made in the past week of the head start that Mnuchin’s contemporary at Goldman Sachs, Gary Cohn, has had in shaping economic policy as director of the National Economic Council, a White House position that doesn’t require Senate confirmation.

But the Treasury secretary is the second-ranking member of the cabinet after the secretary of state — fifth in the line of presidential succession — and the position dates back to the nation’s founding when Alexander Hamilton filled it.

The department has a staff of more than 100,000 — some 90,000 in the Internal Revenue Service alone — including everything from a law enforcement agency like FinCEN to the U.S. Mint and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the country’s chief bank regulator. The department manages the financing of the federal government, from the collection of taxes to the issuance of debt.

It would be a mistake to underestimate how an adept incumbent could leverage that muscle to exert power in Washington.

In any case, it’s already evident that Trump is going to rely more on financiers than on economists to run economic policy. Mnuchin and Cohn between them will be tasked with coming up with creative ways to execute Trump’s agenda of tax reform and infrastructure spending.

In the meantime, the hallowed Council of Economic Advisers is being downgraded to irrelevance, with no appointments on the horizon. The newly created National Trade Council under Peter Navarro — the only economist so far appointed to a high-level position — will focus on international economics, supplying the policy support for actions to be taken by the Commerce Department under Wilbur Ross rather than by the Office of the Trade Representative.

This could all be good news, since the neoliberal economists who have been running economic policy in Washington – and who are now dunning the op-ed pages with screeds about how terrible Trump’s plans are – have done anything but a stellar job.

Pundits stew that they can’t pin down the views of Mnuchin, or Cohn, with some calling the new Treasury secretary a “cipher” and others claiming his views sometimes seem at odds with Republican orthodoxy.

As if that were a bad thing.

Maybe it won’t really hurt the country to have some pragmatic financiers with proven track records to manage economic and fiscal policy rather than political hangers-on like Geithner, or even his successor Jack Lew, both of whom had minimal experience outside government.

Darrell
Delamaide

Darrell Delamaide is a political columnist for MarketWatch in Washington. Follow him on Twitter @MKTWDelamaide.

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